Category Archives: Chinese

I am freaking…It’s already the middle of November and I didn’t even get one word down. I just read…which is good too, of course…all my selfhelp-books recommend reading to a certain extent. Which is the point…to a certain extent. I had hoped to be able to write something down too. I have hired a girl to help me in the stages of writing the thesis and she already thought that I would have put something down. Which I haven’t. I also don’t know if she will charge more if I send her something to read 😉 But still, these are her expectations and it seems that I don’t live up to them. Her normal students would have provided her with at least a few pages already. Considering I met her first time in August, this is really embarrassing. She also recommended to just write to the organizations I want to use in my thesis, which I didn’t even consider. I have to push my boundaries a lot with this thesis. Normally I wouldn’t do that because I am such a chicken…I should get off my ass and write a letter 😦

But at least I have my Chinese language partner now 😉 She is of great help and already had a hand in my progress. I am now nearly enjoying reading Chinese texts, not only because the words that are used are repeated so often that even I remember them…words that I normally don’t know in Chinese like “natural resources”, “weapons of mass destruction” or “border control”….but I learned to love the language again. Additionally I finished my Drama today which I talked about in this post. The end was really annoying and I didn’t even like the lead, which repeatedly seems to be the case with asian dramas. I always end up to like the friends of the lead more, because they are usually written to be livelier, dare to talk back to guys and are more independent. The lead regularly seems to be a naive, needy, weepy, dependent girly-girl who makes decisions nobody can understand. And I don’t even want to talk about the voice this girl has in this drama, which is deeply annoying. The good thing is, this is not only my view, but the comments weren’t very nice and Chinese girls seem to have a problem with the lead too. And they wrote very nasty things which I don’t even want to translate. Chinese girls don’t hold back 😉 The writers don’t seem to know their audience 😉

Wow! Today I did a lot and hopefully I’ll have a Chinese dream. I only had a Chinese dream once…it was funny because while dreaming I thought of the correct grammar. The words I used were very easy, and the Chinese talked like me too 🙂 It was funny but sadly only once. Today I wrote a lot of Chinese characters, watched the “blind date” drama again (I really hate the voice of the main girl, it seems to be dubbed to sound extremely “ladylike”, which is very annoying), listened to Chinese radio stations, learned vocabulary and idioms. I love Chinese idioms. The words which are used are quite easy to understand (mostly ;-), but the real meaning surpasses the words and tells so much about the Chinese mind, which I find very intriguing, fascinating and likeable. Mostly there is always an ancient story to it, and the four characters bear a really deep meaning. From the ones I learned today, I liked this one: 笨头笨脑 the words mean: stupid head stupid mind and the phrase just sums up stupid, or clumsy, and in a really cool way 🙂 There are much more but I only know a few. There are actually “idiom battles” in China, where they just “hit” the opponent with idioms and then the opponent has to counter with another. If you are a foreigner you are met with great respect for handling idioms that well 😉 So I will go on fighting my lonely fight 🙂 If you can identify all the idioms on the left, you are an expert 🙂